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Sunday, August 2, 2015

#95: Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Missteps

As you may be
aware, I have recently began exploring the Souls games, starting with
Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. My opinions on both games are largely
positive. My playthrough of Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First was
informed by these experiences, which explained why I did not like the
game as much. It was not a bad game. However, the game betrays a lack
of understanding as to why many of the choices in the original Dark
Souls were made. This manifests in design changes that cause a number
of problems throughout the game.

The first of these
changes is the resurrection of consumable healing items. As I said
before in my article about the Estus Flasks in the first Dark Souls,
removing the ability to grind for recovery items was a drastic
improvement from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls. Rather than reiterate
points than I spent an entirely separate article making, I just want
to comment on how strange it is to go back to using these items when
they already had such an elegant solution in place.To make this
worse, the imbalance caused by these items is exacerbated by the fact
that the Estus Flask also made its return. It is given to them right
after the tutorial is completed. With the reusable Estus Flask ever
present in the inventory, players are encouraged to amass large
stockpiles of items which they will rarely, if ever, use. I,
personally, only used these Lifegems myself when I was absolutely out
of Estus and in the middle of a boss fight. Otherwise, I would just
hoof it back to the bonfire and try again to maintain my stockpile.

Another alteration
to the game is in the way enemies respawn after being killed. In the
original Dark Souls, returning to a bonfire revived every enemy that
had been defeated, barring a few special exceptions. This is no
longer the case in Dark Souls 2, as each enemy will only respawn a
finite number of times before they will no longer appear (until the
next playthrough). Two major problems arise from this change. First,
like the addition of consumable items, it throws off the balance
between the urge to continue on and the need to rest and replenish
your inventory that I wrote about previously. Making a series of
suicide runs in order to eliminate opponents has now become a
perfectly valid tactic for making it through areas. Rather than
continue to encourage that agonizing decision-making its predecessor
was so famous for, Dark Souls 2 transforms every stage into a battle
of attrition, as each run slowly depletes the enemy forces. I myself
did this a number of time in stages like the Iron Keep and Shulva,
Sanctum City.

And second, because
there are only a finite number of enemies in the game, souls are also
a finite resource. Players receive souls from defeated enemies, which
they can use to purchase items/weapon upgrades and strengthen their
characters. However, should they die, any unspent souls will be lost.
In order to reclaim them, they need to return to the where they died
and touch their bloodstain. Failure to do so before the next death
will result in the permanent loss of those souls. Since enemies in
Dark Souls never stop spawning, there is always a way to acquire more
souls even in the event of heavy losses. Once an enemy stops
appearing in Dark Souls 2, it is impossible to claim their souls by
defeating them. Though I never reached a point where I couldn't
obtain the souls I needed, the knowledge that my deaths were
depleting the world's supply made each one much harder to swallow.

In the original
Dark Souls, I have a very clear memory of exploring the Tomb of the
Giants and amassing over 70000 souls. Just as I was about to return
to the bonfire, my game was invaded by another player, who killed me
in an instant with her barrage of magic and lag. As I attempted to
reach my bloodstain, I was ambushed by a horde of giant skeletons. I
had made a mistake in fighting them, and that mistake meant that
those 70000 souls were gone. My anger at the loss was assuaged by the
knowledge that it would be quite possible to replace those lost Soul
by grinding later on if I had the desire.

During my adventures
in Dark Souls 2, I had similar tales of losses, yet none exceeding
35000 souls at any one time. But even if the losses were momentarily
lower, the knowledge that my ineptitude caused a decrease in not just
the number of souls I had, but also the net total of possible souls
in the game, made those losses sting a lot more. Enemies provide far
more than enough souls for a given playthrough, yet just knowing than
there is only a finite supply makes even small losses feel wasteful.

The biggest
negative change that Dark Souls 2 made was in the way that foes
attack. When an enemy attacked the player in either Demon's Souls or
Dark Souls, they had to commit to both the attack and the direction
in which they were attacking. Since the player was also bound by
these same rules, fights were often fair. The best way to fight would
be to stay on the defensive and look for openings in enemy attack
patterns that could be exploited. Though some of the strongest
enemies did have tracking attacks, it was only up to the point where
they began to strike, and only to compensate for how slow the windup
was for those particular moves.

In the sequel, they
made a bizarre decision that I still don't entirely understand.
Almost every enemy has an uncanny ability to track the player while
they are attacking. This has an adverse effect on the combat, making
it easier for them to land blows and conversely more difficult for
the player to do the same. When I was exploring the Iron Keep in Dark
Souls 2, I encountered an enemy that best demonstrates the problem.
The Ironclad Soldiers held therein are particularly vicious foes with
powerful attacks and decent armor. One of the advantages they have
over the player is that when they wind up to unleash their overhead
smash, they can hold their club in position over their head until the
player is in range. Then, the portion of the move the inflicts damage
will kick in quickly. They are also able to turn and face a strafing
player while actively swinging the club horizontally. No opponent
from previous Souls games have these same advantages to these
degrees, and there is a very good reason for that. When the enemies
are bound to the same rules as the player is, there is a sense of
fairness born from that. The presence of that fairness means that
most failures and deaths in combat can be directly attributed to the
player. Taking it away leaves a sense that game is cheating in order
to win, like a cruel, obstinate dungeon master in a Dungeons and
Dragons campaign.

Again, I do not
want to give off the impression that Dark Souls 2 is a bad game.
Rather, it is a poor continuation of an excellent franchise. Though I
believe that the director of Dark Souls 2 was a fan of the franchise,
the changes made from one project to the next belie a lack of
understanding as to what made the first Dark Souls, and Demon's
Souls, such gems. The guidance of Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed the
earlier Souls games, was not needed to gain this insight. Taking a
moment to see what worked with those two games, what needed
improvement, and the trade-offs of each change would have been a boon
to the production. Such analysis would have prevented many of the
mistakes made in Dark Souls 2.